Improving the Federation Agreements definition ; New proposals out of the NATO MSG-052 Working Group Knowledge Network for Federation Architecture and Design

Designing and managing distributed simulation systems is a complex process requiring extensive experience, in-depth knowledge, and unique skills to construct a federation which meets a myriad of operational, functional and technical requirements. Unfortunately, the practical knowledge gained in the architecture, design, development and systems integration of federations is seldom reused and rarely shared in an effective manner. In a collaborative effort the NATO Research & Technology Organization (RTO) is sponsoring a NATO Modelling and Simulation Group (MSG-052) to establish a knowledge network comprised of a combination of a Community of Practice (CoP), Organisations and Knowledge Repositories all geared towards the development and sharing of information and knowledge on federation architecture and design among North Atlantic Treaty Organization / Partnership for Peace (NATO / PfP) countries. A critical component of federation architecture and design are the federation agreements (FAs). This paper is the result of one year of activities of the MSG-052 Working Group regarding FAs. The group organized three workshops between February 2007 and March 2008 in which it addressed FAs as one of its main topics. In addition to the workshops, the international group of experts used a Collaborative Working Environment (CWE) on a webserver hosted by the Chair nation of MSG-052 (Sweden). This paper presents the consensus view on federation agreements developed out of practical experiences collected from expert federation developers during our workshops. The paper updates and extends our earlier SISO paper (07F-SIW- 058) and it proposes a clearly structured and more formalised approach to FAs. We will present in particular how the new method to define FAs is aligned with SISO’s future Distributed Simulation Engineering and Evaluation Process (DSEEP).